She has dark days and dark nights, and bright days and starry skies. He was diluting the darkness into brightness. But then he became annoyed at her darkness and started to see it all the time even when it wasn’t there. He would poke and prod for it, he was finding boxes of darkness that didn’t exist until he started creating them and suddenly she had more to carry than she realised. He was shouti...

You will fall
You will keep falling
Falling into the depth
The depth of the ocean
Without any doubt
You will reach the bottom
It will suck you up
Into its sticky environment
You can not breathe
And want to escape
You pannick
And do not know what to do
You will keep falling
Falling into the underneath ocean
It feds you up
You want to escape
Escape from the fall
Falling into th...

Speak to me like you speak,
in tongues, or in plain old English
dusted with a view of sparkly seas
or oceans, as you say, my owl.
My crow, my dove, my dolphin
plunging among the waves that roughen,
among the sands that graze and toughen
your skin and hair but soul untouched.
Tell me of the call you heard
from a distance, from the depths
of blue or green or blackened water,
the rover, ...

They were alive only at night
Frightened of daylight
Moon captured them as the stars

If you saw the stars tonight
Then know
They were my dreams once
Now all I have is ashes
Not from smoked cigarettes or burned houses
But from my bones
What became broken
While my heart was trying to escape.

Everyday for her is always the same.
All the struggles, all the pain,
all the hurtful words, and all the pressure
to be someone, and to be something.

And each day she wakes
to feel the hurt again, as it never changes.
And each day she breathes to longer her stay
no matter how much she wants to leave.
And each day she eats to feel whole and to not feel empty
like the way she feels about he...

quietly, quietly sat a lie
arms outstretched
palms staked to the fierce eye
observing within
as, first, flesh mottles
closer still to see without
while blister
vermilion doubts
one apiece of each
seized mortal engine
dripped of framed wax
placed in a filleted whole
gas pored
for a hungry earth
this is all I wish today
let each word die in a dusty throat
a melt th...

May's ESCAPE competition received 27 entries. Remarkably, 15 of these received votes. It was astonishing to me how varied people's preferences are. It's an encouragement to all of us – there is almost certainly someone out there who likes our poetry, even if others don't. We're all different.

Taking both first and second choices into account, four poems had the equal highest num...

The response has been surprisingly slow, particularly from those who've entered. Some people have hinted that reading 26 poems is a bit much. In that sense the competition may be a victim of its own success.

Thank you everyone for your entries in the ESCAPE competition which ran during May. They encompass an extraordinary breadth of experience, from pleasure and beauty to sadness and suffering. To read them has been a privilege, albeit sometimes a painful one. The way we turn life into words never ceases to amaze me.

This is an invitation to vote in the competition. The poems are as liste...

Windows that never wore glass
let the cold in more than ever.
Outside, the dried-up moat
offers no protection,
vulnerable, we suffer.
Cracked between the bricks
and crumbling fast,
these castle walls are falling.
Exposed, we shrivel,
shrink back against the cold, hard floor,
self-afflicted and pitiful,
resigned to ruin and shame.
Surrounded by walls that stand no more.

squeeeeeeezing my way
down this slimy tube no
doubt about it it needs
no lube happening so
fast voices I hear two
of them I’ve heard
before the rest I
do not know I
figured that
the way to
be was
just go
with
the

wander into mary's garden,
stroll amongst the weeds,
catch a rug to old morroco,
high above the trees
sink into the deepest ocean
lie among the wrecks,
let the stone-fish teach you how
to let your self forget.
drift along a tendril green
into a river jade,
wash away the fears you have and
past mistakes you made
sledge down slopes of ignorance
and land into the bliss...

Come now,
Our love is in the past,
so let me slip off to an Opera in Venice
without finding your face in the crowd.
Or walk down Saint Adams St. in the rain
and not smell your lilac perfume.
No mirror is safe for my hollow eyes.
they just serve to remind me that
tears from the heart stain pale cheeks
as surely as red wine stained your dress
at our wedding.